Student Evaluations

Throughout the cohort, your Instructors will be completing biweekly evaluation surveys for each student and delivering them to your Campus Director for review with you on an individual basis. Your evaluation will be scored hollistically with the following scale:

• Must Improve (RED) -- Red means your instructor has serious concerns about your progress. You're not even starting assignments, your comprehension has seen little to no improvement since the last assessment, or you seem to have lost engagement in the class. Your progress has reached the point that there is a serious question of whether you will be able to complete the course on time.
• Needs Improvement (ORANGE) -- Orange means you're doing ok, but the instructor has some concerns about your progress. You may be leaving a lot of work uncompleted, you might not be putting in a level of effort that will let you finish the course, or the instructor is worried that your level of comprehension is below where it should be. Instructor comments will explain specific concerns and areas that need to be addressed.
• Satisfactory (GREEN) -- Green means your instructor is fully satisfied with your progress since the last evaluation, but not that no room exists for improvement. Rather, you are making the progress expected, and you're on track to complete the course.

To generate these scores, the following areas of evaluation are considered, rated on a scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being the maximum. Optionally, your Instructor may provide an indication of trending velocity with 👍 or 👎 badges.

Engagement

Engagement refers to in-class participation, the degree to which you are immersing yourself in the material outside of class, and level of communication with your instructor and cohort. Specific metrics considered for this category include:

1. Are you active in Slack, asking questions and answering the questions of others when you can?
2. Are you bringing outside resources to the attention of your team when you run across something helpful?
3. Are you volunteering responses and making contributions in class or during lab time?

Effort

Effort refers to the time and energy you are putting into both the homework projects assigned and classwork, and also looks at the degree to which your energy is being well-directed. Specific metrics considered for this category include:

1. Are you doing research when you run into an issue you don't understand?
2. Are you asking questions when you don't understand something?
3. Are you spending inordinate amounts of time on something you haven't figured out in lieu of something you do? Bull-dogging is not considered positive effort!
4. Are you making time for class commitments or do you leave early?

Completion

Completion refers to the degree to which you successfully finish both class-work and homework projects. The specific metric instructors are considering for this category of assessment is whether you finished the assigned work, at least in terms of working with the core concepts the assignment covers. Completing BEAST MODE or NIGHTMARE MODE never supercedes Normal Mode or excuses a lack of completion elsewhere.

Comprehension

Comprehension refers to the degree to which you demonstrate that you understand and can apply the key concepts being covered in class and reinforced through homework projects. Your instructors are not expecting mastery but that you've wrestled with the concepts well enough to articulate them. Specific metrics instructors are considering for this category of assessment include:

1. Does your participation in in-class activities demonstrate comprehension or do you stumble over key concepts and drills?
2. Have you attempted or completed the key portions of the homework assignments? Have you done so successfully?
3. Have you attempted to explain the key concepts covered to another student in the cohort, even outside of your class?